"...Defy anything on this planet to submerge you. There is the light of a life-belt in you."

(A.R. Orage)

"...One half tragedy of life is this blaming of others for what happens to us. Warning: sooner or later we shall encounter experiences which we are unprepared for and for which we are so unequipped that they may conquer us..."

[Full Commentary in link]

journalgurdjieffstudies.substack.com/p/90-maurice...

"...As long as this is not so, every tap on the walls of the retort shifts the powders. This means that every change incidental to life shifts us inside and we have no power of inner resistance to the external world and its changing events."

(Maurice Nicoll - "Commentaries")

"...You know that an egg that is being hatched must not be allowed to get cold too long. You have heard also in this teaching that a fire must be lit to heat the alchemical retort in which the metallic powders are contained which must eventually be fused together..."

"…But in order to enable essence to grow up, it is first of all necessary to weaken the constant pressure of personality upon it, because the obstacles to the growth of essence are contained in personality."

(Fragments)

journalgurdjieffstudies.substack.com/p/current-li...

"...The struggle against lying in oneself and the struggle against fears is the first positive work which a man begins to do."

(Gurdjieff, in "In Search of the Miraculous.")

"...These fears must first be found & then destroyed. The fears of which I speak are usually connected with the lies among which a man lives. You must realize that they have nothing in common with the fear of spiders or of mice or of a dark room, or with unaccountable nervous fears.

"…For this it must find the attitude in which it is free, without tension."

(Jeanne de Salzmann)

"…If one centre is tired, it does not participate in the work, and you will not obtain any real result. You have to work with all the centres.”

(Gurdjieff)

Full commentary in link.

journalgurdjieffstudies.substack.com/p/89-maurice...

"...The multitude of business in which we live makes, as it were, a daily uproar. We cannot hear. Later on, perhaps, we begin to listen, when we decide that we must become simpler and can detach ourselves from our roles in life."

(Maurice Nicoll - Commentaries, Vol.I)

"...We have to remember always that there are higher influences playing on us at this moment but that if we are glued to our senses and completely identified with all that we are doing, we cannot become aware of these influences..."

"…Consciousness is an electrical phenomenon which arises from a state of being which we can feel."

(Orage)